Monthly Archives: December 2018

Brandy breath engulfs her faceas he prises the soda canfrom her fingers –

wraps them round a glass:raspberry gin –it’s sweet, like fruit gums.

She watches the open bottle tiltin his hand. Acid slidesto the back of her tongue.

Jinny Fisher is a member of Wells Fountain Poets. Magazines include The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Tears in the Fence, Prole,Strange Poetry, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Commended and placed in national competitions, she is committed to pushing her outreach ‘Poetry Pram’ around festivals for random readings:https://www.facebook.com/PoetryPram/

…to all our readers and contributors, and a big thank you to everyone who has been a part of Algebra of Owls in whatever way. That includes my co-editors, past and present, who put a lot of hours into this project.

Without all that, I would just be a bloke sat in front of a computer muttering to himself.

We have one more poem to publish in 2018, on Boxing Day, then a week off before we start publishing poems again in January – with a Readers’ poll due and the Editor’s Choice Poem of Ian Harker to look forward to.

Finally, a quick reminder that the current submission window is slightly longer than usual and ends on 15th January… for poems we anticipate publishing in March next year.

I was six when the corner hardware store caught fire.We were chased from our apartmentby smoke and heatand the staccato pop of flammables bursting.

I remember the sudden burnof winter and my mom’s blue lips,as my dad, muttering and cursing, tried to coaxthe old Packard Eight to life.

The world outsidewas ice and ash.Sirens bawled and yellow jacketed menwielded axes like armsand strained against hosesstruggling to break free.

Mom told me years laterthat she had wrapped me in an old fur.She said it was the coldest nightof the year and only the heatfrom the car kept us from frostbite.Try as I might I can’t remember that.

I remember I shared the back seatwith my brother –thirteen and the source of all knowledge –and that he’d found a cigarette lighter that weekand showed me how to make a fireof rags and paper,and that his terrified faceflickered all night in the flamelight.

Steve Deutsch lives in State College, PA. His recent publications have or will appear in The Blue Nib, Thimble Magazine, The Muddy River Poetry Review, Ghost City Review, Borfski Press, Streetlight Press, Gravel, Literary Heist, Nixes Mate Review, Third Wednesday, Misfit Magazine, Word Fountain, Eclectica Magazine, The Drabble, and The Ekphrastic Review. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His Chapbook, “Perhaps You Can,” will be published next year by Kelsay Press.

Wearing plastic jelly shoes, stroking grey underbellies of young trout to stupefy scooping the silvery fish up with cupped hands, dropping them plop into jam jars. We sit on the sandy river bank, watching our catch glint in the sun as we eat peanut butter and jam butties curling at the edges, a bottle of Barr’s lemonade cooling in the stream.

When the sun begins to fade, we put the trout back, half-submerging the jam-jar in the stream, the sound of glass chiming against river stone, our feet unsteady balancing on loose pebbles, watching the trout hesitate, uncertain, circling the mouth of the jar,before swimming away, beyond Esh Winning, Rag Path Woods, the river beck.

The driver whistles, sluices his teeth with birdsong,hefts the bus around the corner,briefly mounts the pavementby the Clinic for Cranial Osteopathy.The woman with a cochlea implant laughs nervously;a cackling hen, her mouth opening and closinglike a hatchling.

Kenny who calls me my lady, can’t remember names,is drunk, talks about his job in the steelworks;a fairy tale a long, long time ago,a house built of girders, his broken jaw.

I try to sit outside myself, see who I am.

A man gets on with a hat like a nipple.He has the face of a wart hog, tough grey beard,long teeth. He sits next to the beautiful boywho has a streak of lightning tattooedon his cheek like an angry tear.

The bus races its schedule, tilts on the adverse camberby the cemetery. Someone squeaks with alarm,the beautiful boy touches his tattoo as if it’s a talisman.

Kenny announces that his phlegm is the size of hailstones.They’ve rationed his fags, ordered tests; his booze-edgedbreath travels like an oil slick down the gangway.

Getting off the bus is a bare-knuckle ride.We play chicken with the driver’s sudden applicationof brakes. He’s still whistling with the persistenceof a skylark.

The guillotine is quick. Shutter down. A cut with clean blade. An historical terror. Spills little of her blood.

The bullet – it whizzes past him. Sprints to plot a hole in her fleshand before he blinks she is done in.

He prefers the fencing sword – known as Flynn’s épée –to slash air, have artistry when expertly thrust at her heart.

Not the noose – rope choker – too rough. Almost banal it tightens, winches her up with a jolt. Asphyxiation without restoration.

And being burnt at the stake is no better an end – heated smoke and liquid flame – reduces her to ash and fat.

Then there’s the coward that is poison,hiding in disguise as something too palatable, even for her.

But she knowsit will happen another way –by nature, by ripple, by suction, by weed-clogging,by swallowing a tide of water to her lungs.

The missing premonition –the skin of the witches’ fable,water stretched over the pond,is this daughter’s death reflected in its mirror.

Jane R Rogers has been writing poetry for seven years. Jane is a member of the Greenwich Poetry Workshop and was a member of the Magma Poetry magazine team where she co-edited Magma 65. Jane’s poems have appeared in Atrium, Prole, Ink Sweat & Tears, Long Exposure Magazine, Obsessed with Pipework, in Greenwich Poetry Workshop’s anthologies and in the Tate Gallery Website poetry anthology 2012. Jane lives in London but misses the West Country.

the strangely folded woman in the woods. She was under a polished white rock. We took her home and opened her out very carefully, dried her by the fire. She had eyes like a surprised crow. She told us tales with a language that sounded like black wings circling winter trees. When she fell asleep, we pressed her flat again and took her back to the forest, pinning her down beneath the same stone. It was then we noticed the elaborately carved sign. It said ‘Do not -’. The final words had been scratched out.

When we got back home we found her stories sitting in our chairs, warming their huge boots by the fire.

Andrew Turner has been published online and in print. He lives in Staffordshire.